"He [Aydin Dikmen] lived
in the most affluent sector of Konya where the streets were
lined with detached villas and blocks of white-plastered
apartments. We climbed to his first-floor flat and sat with
a drink while he disappeared below. The living room was
furnished at some expense in a style reminiscent of the
early thirties. Wooden armed chairs were scattered on a
highly decorated carpet, and lamps of convoluted chromium
stood on almost every side table. But its main feature was
the glass case that divided Dikmen's dining-table from the
rest of the room. It contained at least four rows of
exquisite antiquities; only a taste of what was to
come.

We left the flat and followed him down to the
basement. And there, in a white-washed room about sixteen
feet long and eight feet wide, was his museum. The walls
were covered, almost without interruption, with display
cases which were packed with a dazzling variety of precious
objects: Lydian gold wreaths, vases of Rome and Greece,
boxes of coins. His collection, he said, contained in all
about 1,900 items. They were worth at a rough estimate well
over 10,000 pounds.

As beautiful as the entire exhibition
was, there were several objects arranged neatly in a corner
case which attracted our immediate attention. It was like
homing on a radar beam. Dikmen had an obsidian mirror from
Catal Huyuk, its unmarred surface in infinitely better
condition than that of the examples preserved in the Ankara
museum. He also had obsidian blades and a necklace. There
were other objects which he claimed came from Catal Huyuk
and were therefore Neolithic, but in fact they were early
Bronze Age artifacts from a site at Can Hasan further to the
south. Alongside these, Dikmen had placed several pots from
Hacilar, Mellaart's other dig." -- Kenneth Pearson and
Patricia Connor (1967, The
Dorak Affair)

"One cannot complain of having no
clues... There are clues here in abundance." -- Agatha
Christie, Murder on the Orient
Express

British journalist David Aaronovitch
commented recently in The Times of London's editorial
pages on the death of archaeologist James Mellaart, whose
passing has largely gone unnoticed in the media even though
Mellaart's discoveries in Turkey in the late 50s at Hacilar
and Catal Huyuk led to a universal rethinking of civilized
life in the ancient Near East. In the August 9 Times
piece, which highlights Mellaart also fabricating a
treasure, the Dorak Treasure, leading to scandal following
publication of drawings of the artifacts, Aaronovitch cites
my cracking the Dorak hoax through analysis of a letter
supposedly sent from the owner of the collection to Mellaart
authorizing him to publish the evidence (see Dorak Series linked above). Aaronovitch
refers to my observation that capital "I" instead of "1" was
used to date both Mellaart's personal correspondence at the
time the Dorak episode was unfolding as well as the letter
from the imaginary owner, Anna Papastrati. Without naming
him, Aaronovitch also points to my interview with
UC-Berkeley archaeologist David Stronach, a former colleague
of Mellaart's and author of part of Mellaart's Dorak
monograph, who told me Dorak was in reality Mellaart's
"dream-like episode," one that grew into an "enterprise."
What Aaronovitch doesn't mention is the fact that both
Stronach and Mellaart were friends of archaeologist Max
Mallowan, and more importantly, of his wife Agatha
Christie.

I thought it might be good to revisit my
conversation with former Sunday Times writers,
Patricia Connor and her husband, the dramatist Kenneth
Pearson (now deceased), which focused on the connection
between James Mellaart and Turkish collector-dealer Aydin
Dikmen. As I mentioned in "Getting to the Bottom of the
Dorak Affair," Aydin Dikmen is thought to have served as
some inspiration for Mellaart's fantasy.

Pearson and
Connor wrote The Dorak Affair, the book that
first chronicled events. I spoke with them at their home on
the outskirts of London in June 1991 where they revealed to
me over tea and toast with honey that they had thrown away
all their notes and switched careers, even though Dorak
remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th
century I was further surprised to learn that they had not
spoken with "Jimmie" Mellaart in 20 years.

The
interview follows:

Suzan Mazur: Why did you go to
Konya to see Aydin Dikmen?

Patricia Connor: Because
he lived there. I can't remember.

Kenneth Pearson:
He did live there. He lived in a small house, I believe, on
the outskirts of the town. And I think that at that time we
were wanting to meet as many people as possible to do with
archaeology both professionally or in the trade, so to
speak. What was very difficult in those days was to
distinguish between somebody who was a genuine collector --
a Turkish collector -- and somebody who was in the business
of running stolen artifacts out of the country.And I can
remember we met that man in Istanbul, didn't we, who had
this fabulous collection. I can't remember his
name.

Patricia Connor: Some years ago we threw away
all our notes on the basis that we wouldn't need them
anymore.

Suzan Mazur: But when did you first meet
Dikmen and how did you know to look him up?

Patricia
Connor: Because as far as I can remember, although we'd
done the business with the dealers -- although we'd had
contact with dealers in the covered bazaar, there were
nonetheless collectors as distinct from dealers we'd been
told to go and see. And Aydin Dikmen's name kept cropping
up. But I think as a collector rather than as a
dealer.

Suzan Mazur: He was a collector at the
time.

Patricia Connor: He was a
collector.

Suzan Mazur: You called him a
"jazz-musician collector."

Patricia Connor: That's
right. I mean, I know because I looked at the
picture.

Suzan Mazur: And now he calls himself an
archaeologist.

Patricia Connor: He certainly wasn't
that.

Kenneth Pearson: He would know a lot about it
by handling stuff -- you know real stuff.

Patricia
Connor: I'm trying to remember the name of the other
collector we went to in Istanbul. And I think I may have it
here. Because I have all the press cuttings that came
out.

Suzan Mazur: So because you thought of Dikmen
as a collector, you weren't even thinking in terms of his
being a smuggler.

Kenneth Pearson: I think one has
doubts. No. No. Not with him. I think one had doubts about
everybody one met. Anybody who was a collector. It's like in
the modern world of museums. If you have a man who's a
famous curator in a field of activity who collects for his
museum, does he collect for himself on the side? If he buys
a piece, does he buy it for his museum or for his own
apartment? I meant that's been known in the past both in
America and in this country. So when you're looking at a
small time collector, and Dikmen was small in those days, as
I remember him getting everything out on the table. I
associate him most with obsidian mirrors.

Patricia
Connor: He had those very small pieces. I don't remember
him having anything very spectacular -- particularly looking
at the picture we took of him then with his collection. It's
not what you would call a major collection of
artifacts.

Kenneth Pearson: But he might have had a
lot hidden which we…

Patricia Connor: But I think
he would have shown us. The point about it is -- I think
that at that stage we were going around and seeing everyone
who was a collector because every one of them must have
bought their material from somewhere. I think what we were
trying to do was to build up an idea of the network that was
going on in Turkey at that time between collectors, dealers,
illegal excavators, legal excavators and all that sort of
thing.

Suzan Mazur: You were probably one of the
first to be doing this type of story in Turkey.

Kenneth
Pearson: I think so, and it was purely to protect the
reputation of James Mellaart, the English archaeologist.
When I say protect him -- as a journalist you don't go out
to protect anybody. You go out to find out if the story is
right. Now if it turns out that he is a crook and he is
smuggling things, then you've got a great story. If he isn't
a crook, then you've got another good story because he's
been defamed by another nation.

Suzan Mazur: Did
you know him from...

Patricia Connor: Yes. It's as
it's set out in the book. I was an archaeology student and
just at the time I was joining the Sunday Times
Kenneth said to me, "What's the greatest site in the world
that could be written about?" A hypothetical
question.

Kenneth Pearson: For an Englishman --
remember?

Patricia Connor: No, at that point you
said, "What would be the most exciting site in the world to
write about?" And I was particularly interested in the site
Catal Huyuk because when I was a student I was interested in
the Neolithic Age.

Suzan Mazur: Where did you
study?

Patricia Connor: I did my archaeology at
Cambridge. We then said maybe there's a piece for the color
magazine about Catal Huyuk. Even now Catal is acknowledged
as a site of absolute world importance in terms of the
history of urbanization.

Patricia Connor: Yes of course, that was the
whole point. What happened then was we started to
investigate how we could get out to Catal, see Mellaart
excavating and then the whole can of worms was opened up.
Because they had been refused. The British Institute of
Archaeology had been refused an excavation permit. And we
said well, why would the Turks do that if this dig were of
such importance?

And BIA said, oh well, don't you know the
story?

That's when Mellaart's -- the whole Dorak story was
told to us first of all. We said that is far more
interesting than the Catal Huyuk story. So we went to Turkey
at 10 days' notice to try and trace this through and find
out what it was all about. It was a very much spur of the
moment departure Jimmie was going off. Because we met Jimmie
in a restaurant and he told us about the excavation at
Catal.

Suzan Mazur: When did you first meet
him?

Kenneth Pearson: We took him to
lunch.

Patricia Connor: It was in London in May of
1966. We met him and he said as soon as I've got my dig
permit I'll let you know and you'll come out this summer, in
August or something.

Suzan Mazur: This was after
the Dorak affair.

Patricia Connor: 1966 was when we
investigated the story. The Dorak business had gone on in
the late 50s and into early 60s -- I can't remember the
exact chronology. It's all laid out in the book. The whole
business had been dragging on through the Turkish press
after the publication of Mellaart's big article in the
Illustrated London News. The Turks were so incensed
by this that they'd withdrawn Mellaart's excavation permit.
And Mellaart was the only man who could dig at Catal Huyuk
because it was a very specialized site. It was his
site.

So we agreed with him that as soon as he got his dig
permit, he would let us know and we'd all go out to Catal
Huyuk that summer and see him working on the site. Next
thing we know, we call up the institute and they say: Oh
he's already gone and no, there's no permit.

We said, Why?
And they say: Well don't you know the whole story?

I can't
remember what the exact line was, but it was very
elliptical. So we thought, well this was a story to
investigate.

Suzan Mazur: Mellaart didn't let on at
all when you met him in the restaurant that something had
gone awry?

Patricia Connor: No. No. No. And we went
out to Istanbul and we met him. I think at that point he
didn't think there would be a complication. I think he
thought everything was going to be alright.

Kenneth
Pearson: I think he was hoping it wouldn't happen. I
think he was a very complex person. But that's only as far
as I would go.

Patricia Connor: I think he's
naive. I think he's a naive person. He hadn't realized. Now
20 years on, he would know full well implications of all
this.

Suzan Mazur: It's really devastated his life,
hasn't it?

Patricia Connor: I would imagine so. We
haven't seen him for years and years. We don't know what
he's doing now.

Suzan Mazur: I was told he's never
excavated again.

Patricia Connor: No.

Suzan
Mazur: Anywhere.

Patricia Connor: He's always
got great plans. But it was doubly complicated because his
wife is Turkish. Her family was very distinguished, Istanbul
high society. Mellaart was very well connected in Istanbul,
and that was another complication. He obviously didn't want
to be declared persona non grata in the country. But
I think in this instance he was naive. He hadn't realized
the implications, how the Turks would be angered by what was
going on. He hadn't really thought it through.

Kenneth
Pearson: But I also think, if you think of Milliyet
as a kind of Istanbul Daily News -- passionately
nationalistic regardless of the issues.

Patricia
Connor: In those days.

Kenneth Pearson: Yes, in
those days. And therefore, not quick off the mark to check
facts. Rumors got printed as facts. When we started looking
at the story that they'd run, I think that they were
hopelessly inaccurate. And they ran stories against
us.

Suzan Mazur: Really.

Kenneth Pearson:
Oh yes.

Suzan Mazur: But you don't have any
problems traveling back there?

Pearson and Connor:
No. No. We went back.

Patricia Connor: We went back
the following year for a long, long thing as guests of the
Turkish Government.

Kenneth Pearson: Yes, that's
right. It was only Milliyet, wasn't it. I mean you
read in the story about how we went to see the governor who
listened to what we had to say and rang the police station
to give us access. That would never happen in England, and I
doubt whether it would happen in the United States. We were
absolutely amazed when the governor did it, and when we got
to the police station they had had the phone call. We were
able to question everybody and go through their files. And
the Milliyet story didn't hang
together.

Patricia Connor: Do you read
Turkish?

Suzan Mazur: No.

Patricia Connor:
Then you will know as little about what these articles mean
as we did.

Suzan Mazur: These are from
Milliyet?

Patricia Connor: Yes. These are
the articles that came out after our article in the color
magazine. Commenting on what we'd done. They all picked it
up. And the whole thing was reactivated not so much after
the book but after the Sunday Times article. Because
they were the first rebreaking of the story behind
that.

Kenneth Pearson: Is that the man in the
bazaar? He, you know they were so two-faced. He was going to
sell us a Catal Huyuk figure as a genuine.

Suzan
Mazur: And it was fake.

Kenneth Pearson: Then
afterwards he said it was a fake. I said, "Can I take your
picture?"He said, "No, because you've got a wide-angle
lens." But we took a photograph and of the
object.

Suzan Mazur: You mentioned when you went to
Aydin Dikmen's home that there were pieces there from
Hacilar and Catal Huyuk, which is where Mellaart
excavated.

Patricia Connor: Is that what we say in
the book? Can you remember the page reference? Because I
can't find it.

Suzan Mazur: It says Mellaart was
excavating there in both places.

Patricia Connor:
Oh here it is. I've got it. Jimmie excavated at Hacilar
first through the late 50s and early 60s. And, of course,
once an excavation finishes, the local peasants move in to
see what they can find on the site. So there's immediately a
very, very profitable trade in apparently pieces that have
been excavated, most of which are probably fake. As you
probably know, if you know about Hacilar antiquities -- a
lot of Hacilar pots in the world's museums are fake,
probably 90% -- beautifully made, beautifully
finished.

Suzan Mazur: I thought there were Hacilar
figures.

Patricia Connor: No there were Hacilar
pots as well.

Suzan Mazur: In Dikmen's
collection?

Patricia Connor: Oh, in Dikmen's
collection. I can't remember.

Suzan Mazur: I think
the photograph you have, there are Hacilar pieces there. The
Neolithic goddess.

Patricia Connor: Yes. But he was a
collector. The point one was making was there were
collectors in Turkey. I don't remember ever making a
judgment in the sense that. I mean it wasn't a judgmental
book about collectors and smugglers as a whole. What we were
trying to isolate was who had duped Mellaart in the case of
the Dorak treasure. One could never assume that Dikmen was
anything to do with that. He probably would have been too
young at the time.

Suzan Mazur: Too young
for?

Patricia Connor: Well, we were meeting him 10
years after the Dorak thing had happened. And he was a
fairly young man then. He was what in his early 30s. It's
unlikely that he would have been involved in a big scam like
the Dorak thing 10 years before. I'm sure that was
orchestrated as a much more…

Suzan Mazur: You met
him in 1966.

Patricia Connor: '66.

Suzan
Mazur: And Dorak happened in--

Patricia Connor:
'58-'59.

Kenneth Pearson: I can't
remember.

Patricia Connor: The letter from Anna
Papastrati to Jimmie giving him the authority to publish the
material was the 18th of October 1958. Now he had waited a
long time for that letter. I mean I really don't remember. I
haven't looked at this stuff since 1966…

Suzan
Mazur: Nobody could ever find Anna or the
house.

Patricia Connor: No. I mean we went down the
street, up and down the street, counting out the numbers and
everything. I think that the -- in terms of Aydin Dikmen --
so many people talked about the really powerful smugglers,
who I didn't think we had met, were shipping stuff out it
was generally held through the American base at
Izmir.

Kenneth Pearson: Izmir. We photographed it.
But we didn't actually go up to the Americans and say are
you smuggling? It would be a very simple answer. "No."

But
it was generally thought -- being the sort of ally that
nobody was questioning -- that bags or diplomatic bags,
anything could go out. That's on the main, top level. On the
lower level, you've got possibly small collectors like
Dikmen and you can't tell whether they're collecting for
themselves or whether they have a basic collection and sell
bits off one end and take bits on the other, which I think
they do. Then you have the peasants who pounced on a site
once the archaeologists left and started to find one or two
genuine pieces, which as Pat said, make masses of fakes.

I
remember the man who went away and got that jar. The
photograph of him looking at this pot, with gold
wristwatches and everything, which he traded. It was so
muddy. You really couldn't point the finger at anybody and
say exactly what he was.

Suzan Mazur: But he
[Dikmen] had a pretty healthy collection at the time you met
him.

Patricia Connor: I'm just reading what we
said.

Suzan Mazur: He was probably putting that
together for a few years.

Patricia Connor: Well,
yes. Absolutely. I've got no doubt now looking back that he
was collecting and dealing presumably. Most collectors
become dealers if only in the sense that they get tired of
pieces and they want to move on.

Suzan Mazur:
Dikmen could have known Mellaart if he's been collecting
from his 20s. He was 30, 31 when you met
him...

Patricia Connor: I don't think -- apart from
what we say and hear, I don't think we should discuss
whether or not he knew Jimmie Mellaart.

Suzan
Mazur: But he says in the book that he
does.

Patricia Connor: Well he claims.

Kenneth
Pearson: No, he said he knew him. But I
mean...

Patricia Connor: There should not be any
implication that Jimmie was selling him material otherwise
it's just going to blow up again. And without going back to
square one, I don't think one can make any
comment.

Kenneth Pearson: I would have thought the
way that they did it, if they did anything, was to operate
round the edges of these camps. Get to know the people who
were digging.

Patricia Connor: Well, this is what
he says.

Kenneth Pearson: And offer them bits of
money to pocket an obsidian mirror. Find three, own up to
two, and sell one off, you know. I would think that's how.
And the archaeologist in charge would not have to know that
this was going on. I think actually Dikmen's the kind of man
who claims to know everybody. This is what big dealers do --
don't they.

Suzan Mazur: What was he
like?

Kenneth Pearson: He's a smoothie. I mean what
could you tell in one small interview.

Suzan Mazur:
He talks a lot?

Kenneth Pearson: Yes. He's a
talker.

Suzan Mazur: Did you speak with him in
Turkish?

Pearson and Connor: No. No.

Patricia
Connor: In English. We didn't have an
interpreter.

Suzan Mazur: He speaks fluent
English?

Patricia Connor: We didn't have an
interpreter.

Kenneth Pearson: He spoke pretty good
English as I remember

Suzan Mazur:
Really.

Patricia Connor: Yes. I think he
did.

Suzan Mazur: That's very
interesting.

Patricia Connor: Why does he claim he
doesn't speak English?

Suzan Mazur: Well maybe it's
because he's been living in Munich.

Kenneth
Pearson: We didn't have an interpreter with
us.

Patricia Connor: No. And I don't believe that
if we had an interpreter with us, he would have shown us the
collection as he did.

Suzan Mazur: You don't
remember how you came across him. Who introduced
you?

Patricia Connor: Did we say in
here?

Suzan Mazur: I don't think so.

Kenneth
Pearson: One of the obvious connections. You can
tell.

Suzan Mazur: Do you feel paranoid about this
book at all?

Patricia Connor: Paranoid?

Suzan
Mazur: Because there are still questions about the
book.

Pearson and Connor: No.

Suzan Mazur:
Has it affected your lives negatively in any
way?

Patricia Connor: No, we did the book, We did a
complete job in the sense that we came up with a conclusion.
Our own conclusion. It didn't resolve anything as far as
Jimmie Mellaart was concerned. But we're journalists. We
then moved on to the next job. You know. That was it. We did
the next thing.

Suzan Mazur: What do you think
about Anna Papastrati? Do you think she actually existed? Do
you think this affair actually happened?

Patricia
Connor: I don't believe Jimmie is the kind of person who
would have made it up. He's not that. As I said, he's a very
naive man and I think he got embroiled through his naivety.
We've always felt that And I still believe that. I have no
reason then or since to change my mind about that. I don't
think he's a criminal or a crook. I think he was taken for a
ride.

Suzan Mazur: And these were his sketches that
were published in the Illustrated London
News.

Patricia Connor: I'm sure. Because he
showed us the original material. He's got rubbings and
things which you have to take off material. You don't just
make it up.

Kenneth Pearson: I'm trying to guess
now after all these years. I really don't believe that he --
maybe I'm wrong -- maybe I'm naive -- but I really don't
believe that he could have put together a scam of that
grandeur. To start inventing rubbings and doing
drawings.

Suzan Mazur: But now in Turkey all these
fakes that exist -- people make such a business inventing
artifacts. Is it possible that some of these pieces may have
been invented that he took rubbings of?

Patricia
Connor: Oh yes. Oh yes! Of course. And the collection
certainly wasn't homogeneous. They claimed that it was from
one tomb but it certainly wasn't. And the idea generally
speaking was that it had been put together as a collection
and that some pieces were better than others. Other pieces
may have been fake. One simply doesn't know. That they then
needed an academic to give it, to lend it authority. They
fell on Jimmie whether it was because they knew he was naive
or that he was gullible. I don't know why. Whether he was
working in the right period. He was the man they wanted.
This is the theory we ended up with. And I think it's
possibly true

Kenneth Pearson: Yes. I think even
today there's so much money involved. I mean the Goldberg
thing [Kanakaria Mosaics] -- there's so much money involved
that it's worth the investment of time. Building up a
collection. Thinking the story. Making the story. Adding
little bits where there are gaps and building up a treasure
and then hanging on to it for 10 years. Rumors go round
Zurich or whatever and people get interested. It's a great
game if you want to spend your life playing it. I think
that's what really happened with this.

Suzan Mazur:
So you think some pieces were not genuine.

Patricia
Connor: I don't know. We never saw it. All we saw were
his drawings.

[Note: In The Dorak Affair, Connor and
Pearson describe examining Mellaart's 60,000 word Dorak
monograph, which they say gave a "physical description and
provenance of all the objects that were said to come out of
the two [Yortan] tombs."]

One can't possibly judge
that easily which was genuine. The point is, as we've said
before, an archaeologist never thinks in terms of fakes
because an archaeologist is used to seeing pieces come out
of the ground. Unless a site has been assaulted, the
material coming out of the ground is genuine. So an
archaeologist doesn't automatically look at a piece and
think it's a fake. He might think -- oh it poses problems
about stratigraphy and that sort of thing, but he doesn't
think in terms of fakes. That's just not the way an
archaeologist thinks. A museum person thinks in terms of
fakes. A dealer does. But not an archaeologist. At least
then that was true. It may not be true now. I don't know how
an archaeologist would think. I can't believe any English
archaeologist working on a site would see an object and
think: "Oh God, is it fake?"

Suzan Mazur: You must
have thought about this endlessly. What do you think
happened to the treasure and Anna Papastrati?

Patricia
Connor: We don't know about Anna Papastrati. I mean, I
think she was just a girl who was used. She was part of a
group. Whatever. I don't know what happened to
her.

Kenneth Pearson: She could have been set
up.

Patricia Connor: She could have been set
up.

Kenneth Pearson: Not set up. She could have
been part of the whole parade.

Suzan Mazur: Do you
think she was an agent of the Turkish
Government?

Pearson and Connor: No.

Kenneth
Pearson: Set up by whoever was trying to sell the
collection.

Suzan Mazur: Why show it to
Mellaart?

Patricia Connor: They needed an
archaeologist to authenticate. How do you authenticate this?
Mellaart says yes I will make notes and I will publish it.
And as soon as something is published in the Illustrated
London News, certainly in those days, it becomes an
accepted object. An accepted collection. Well, of course by
the time it appeared in the Illustrated London News
it had been shipped out of Turkey and was sitting in a vault
somewhere ready to be shown to a collector who was prepared
to buy it.

Suzan Mazur: But it's never turned
up.

Patricia Connor: Oh bits of it have turned up.
Well, we don't know that. Bits that look remarkably like it
have turned up over the years.

Suzan Mazur:
Where?

Patricia Connor: Some bits have turned up in
Boston. Some bits have turned up in Texas.

Suzan
Mazur: I've been told the collection in Boston is not
from the right area. It's from Mersin.

Patricia
Connor: Oh. Yes. Well there's that.

Suzan
Mazur: So it can't be part of the Dorak
Treasure.

Patricia Connor: But I heard various
pieces turned up in Texas. Midwest. Private collectors who
hoard the stuff.

Suzan Mazur: Anyone in
particular?

Patricia Connor: No. I can't remember.
I really can't remember. I honestly don't remember.What
I'm saying is in the five, ten years after the book came
out, one knew the journalists who were interested in this
whole thing. And I would get phone calls saying: Have you
heard that this has turned up? And I'd say: How interesting.
But we had moved on to other things. I wasn't interested in
hearing it.

Suzan Mazur: You don't think he
[Mellaart] was set up by the Turkish
Government?

Patricia Connor: The Dorak thing
happened as an event in 1958. He was excavating Catal until
the mid 60s. Why would the Turkish Government set him up in
the late 50s so that seven or eight years later, on the
chance he might be developing an important site they could
discredit him? It doesn't make sense. Whoever says that
hasn't worked it out. I don't know who it is.

Suzan
Mazur: A friend of James Mellaart.

Patricia
Connor: Really. Well. James Mellaart doesn't really want
to talk about this at all.

Suzan Mazur: James
Mellaart doesn't want to talk about this at
all

Patricia Connor: I'm sure he doesn't. I'm sure
he doesn't. I mean it's blighted his life. He was very
pleased when the book came out. There was no feeling that it
had done him down. Because although we didn't exonerate him,
we didn't blame him either. I think it was a fair and honest
examination of everything that had happened in a purely
dispassionate way.

But after that nothing actually was
resolved. Things didn't get better And I would think in the
20 years -- we haven't seen him since probably 1970 -- in
the 20 years that have gone by since then, clearly things
haven't gotten better. The situation in Turkey has gotten
worse, and it has genuinely blighted his life as an
archaeologist.

I mean he is a brilliant archaeologist. But
to say that the Turkish Government set him up in the 50s is
crazy. Why on earth should they? He was a research student
at the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara. He was
terribly, terribly junior. He wasn't seen as an eminent
archaeologist in those days.

If somebody set him up, and
as I said, I don't believe it was the Turkish Government --
if somebody set him up, it was because he was known to be
extremely clever and had an authority in the sense that he
came from the British Institute in Ankara. But he wasn't a
target in that sense because of his eminence and his career.
It was because he was being useful to them not the other way
around.

Kenneth Pearson: And if he was involved in
it in a bad sort of way, why would he take the risk in
ruining his life as an archaeologist? He's got absolutely
nothing out of it.

Suzan Mazur: I've heard that he
was authenticating pieces in general. But this I guess would
be after the Dorak affair. He was authenticating Hacilar
pieces. He was giving endorsements.

Patricia
Connor: There's only one way to authenticate Hacilar
pieces -- through a thermoluminescence test. You have to
take a boring from the pot and you have to do a date test.
That's the only way you can authenticate it. You can
authenticate it stylistically and if it's a good fake, an
archaeologist is actually not going to tell the
difference.

These things are faked so well because there's
so much money involved, so you have to authenticate if
scientifically. An archaeologist can't do that. They have to
go to a lab.

Kenneth Pearson: And it wasn't
available. Not in a wide sort of way.

Patricia
Connor: Well it was available. The one at Oxford was
authenticated by the Oxford lab. Yes. It could be done. But
Jimmie couldn't do it except stylistically and by the feel
of the glaze and that sort of thing, unless he saw it come
out of the ground.Suzan Mazur:
Right.

Kenneth Pearson: Then it could have been
buried there and you could spot that if you're an
archaeologist. The fact is that he was brilliant.

Suzan
Mazur: But that's help to a dealer.

Patricia
Connor: What is?

Suzan Mazur: If an
archaeologist authenticates a piece.

Kenneth
Pearson: Well yes.

Suzan Mazur: I'd heard along
the way from dealers that he had been doing this and you can
do it in such a way that it helps a dealer set a piece at a
higher price.

Patricia Connor: Well sure. I can
understand that people would say, oh well, yes, Mellaart
when he failed to continue to work as an archaeologist, he
was making his living signing certificates for
dealers.

Suzan Mazur: I don't know at what point he
was doing this, whether he was still doing archaeology when
he was authenticating pieces.

Patricia Connor:
I'm worried about this conversation because we haven't
seen Jimmie for 21 years. I don't know what he's been doing
since and I don't think we should discuss it. I'd be happy
to discuss Aydin Dikmen. What we remember about him. But I'm
not prepared to discuss what Jimmie's been doing with other
dealers. All that I know is what went on at the period that
we'd written the book.

Suzan Mazur: There were
two dealers you referred to in Izmir in the book. Do you
remember who they were?

Patricia Connor: What were
their names.

Kenneth Pearson: It wasn't Istanbul.
It was Izmir.

Patricia Connor: It was.

Kenneth
Pearson: Kosibas.

Patricia Connor: Kosibas was
the big one we went to on the day we had the World Cup
football final. Do you remember?

Kenneth Pearson:
He had an upstairs apartment.

Patricia Connor: He
had a two-story shop that was absolutely amazing. I do have
some notes on that. Do you remember that very nice
journalist who took us there? I've got a letter from him.
His name was Dundar Ozar. Because he was going on after we
left. He was going to go on and try and do
something.

Suzan Mazur: Was he with one of the
publications?

Patricia Connor: No, I think he was
tourist officer actually.

Suzan Mazur: And he
introduced you to dealers?

Patricia Connor: He
didn't introduce us. He took us there. He acted as
interpreter. He said, "The Sunday Times. I send you
here with copies of Yeni Tanin, which condemned your
article by interviewing the people you mentioned and
photographed." Here are the passages of their comments.
[Connor reads Turkish press.]

Suzan Mazur: It must
have been a great adventure.

Patricia Connor:
There's also the two-story shop that we went to in Izmir,
which is amazing. Do you remember? And was that not
Kosibas's shop?

Kenneth Pearson: Well I thought it
was. It was a very dark apartment with glass cases in
it.

Suzan Mazur: That sounds like
Dikmen's.

Kenneth Pearson: No it wasn't
Dikmen's.

Suzan Mazur: He had a glass case in the
apartment full of...

Patricia Connor: Yes. But they
all have that. They're all modern apartments with marble
floors.

Suzan Mazur: Dikmen's had furniture from
the 30s and I think chromium lamps.

[Note:I
describe Dikmen's apartment from the Pearson & Connor
book:"He lived in the most affluent sector of
Konya where the streets were lined with detached villas and
blocks of white-plastered apartments. We climbed to his
first-floor flat and sat with a drink while he disappeared
below. The living room was furnished at some expense in a
style reminiscent of the early thirties. Wooden armed chairs
were scattered on a highly decorated carpet, and lamps of
convoluted chromium stood on almost every side table. But
its main feature was the glass case that divided Dikmen's
dining-table from the rest of the room. It contained at
least four rows of exquisite antiquities; only a taste of
what was to come."]

Kenneth Pearson: The
obvious thing why he's in Munich, presumably, is because of
the enormous number of Turkish workers in Germany. If you
have a half-million workers of any nation, there are going
to be some good crooks among them, aren't there? There has
always been a good connection between Berlin and Istanbul
pre-First World War. The kind of affinity between the low
life in Germany and whatever would enable Dikmen to operate
quite easily. And when you think you've got Turkish workers
on the move, it's like engaging people to take
cocaine.

Suzan Mazur: Were you surprised to see
Dikmen's name pop up in the Goldberg case?

Kenneth
Pearson: Yes. Really.

Patricia Connor: Who was
it bought the picture from us then? One of the television
companies, didn't they, quite recently. About a year ago. Oh
no. And it was in The Independent. We billed The
Independent for it. These pictures pop up.

Kenneth
Pearson: Without any reference to us. I rang them up and
kindly reminded them that they used our photo.

Suzan
Mazur: And did they pay you?

Kenneth Pearson:
Quite handsomely. Do you know Karl Meyer? Is he still
alive?

Suzan Mazur: Yes. Editorial Board, New
York Times.

Patricia Connor: Well, he's one of
the people who used to ring me up and say: Hey, there's a
bit of Dorak cropped up. Have you talked to
him?

[Discussion about Meyer's book, The Plundered
Past.]

Suzan Mazur: But he seemed like a pretty
resourceful guy when you met him, Aydin Dikmen? He was
working as a draftsman. He was playing jazz in Konya --
working all the time. Was he married then?

Kenneth
Pearson: I don't remember.

Patricia Connor: No,
I don't think so. He's a Turk. We wouldn't have seen his
wife, would we? I have the impression that he wasn't. But I
don't know why I say that. I don't remember seeing any
evidence of any sort of domestic life around him, if you
know what I mean.

I remember going into his house. There
was a doorway and we went in. It was rather a nice garden.
There was a lot of greenery. And the room where we took
those photographs was a sort of sunroom on the front of the
house. Do you remember that? I can remember it quite
clearly.

[Note: James Mellaart in conversation with
Pearson and Connor, The Dorak Affair--

Pearson and
Connor: "Mellaart took a scrap of paper and began to sketch
an outline of the first floor."

Mellaart: "It [Anna
Papastrati's house] was very old, with two or three
floors... I was given a small bedroom in the corner here,
next to the dining-room. It had a balcony and that
overlooked a garden at the side and round the
back."]

Kenneth Pearson: I don't remember
anything except sitting in front with that stuff from
Milliyet.

Patricia Connor: Well, have a look
when you get back because there are three or four pages on
it [in Karl Meyer's book].

Suzan Mazur: About
Dorak.

Patricia Connor: Yes. He might well be able
to give you some hints because I know he stayed on it much
longer than we did and came up with little snippets. He
would get in touch with me. He even came here for dinner
once and we talked about the bits and pieces that were
appearing.

And Julia. Have you come across a friend of
ours called Julia Cave?

Suzan Mazur:
No.

Patricia Connor: Well, she works for the BBC.
She used to worked for the archaeology program. She's done
an enormous number of television programs about smuggling.
She's one of the great experts in this country.

Kenneth
Pearson: She's at South Kensington.

Patricia
Connor: No, Shepard's Bush. Kensington Path.

Suzan
Mazur: What was your impression of Dikmen
generally?

Patricia Connor: Oh. I mean probably
charming. I mean most of these people.

Kenneth
Pearson: Simple.

Patricia Connor: No. I don't
think he was simple at all. He was extremely clever. He was
telling us what he wanted to tell us. You know what it is
like. You go and interview people and you become extremely
disingenuous to get more and more and more. He plays the
same game. We reported what he said, and I don't think we
disbelieved him.

Suzan Mazur: Did he say anything
about his roots?

Patricia Connor: Well, we found
out he was a trumpet player or whatever we called
it.

Kenneth Pearson: I think looking back, it's
very interesting in the sense that we weren't -- all the big
smuggling stories that have happened in the press and
television and film have happened since then. But I don't
think that we were there as inside journalists getting hold
of the hot story of smugglers. We met two French journalists
[Jean Vidal and Rene Dazy] while we were there who were
doing for Paris exactly what we were doing looking at
Mellaart.

Suzan Mazur: This was before the UNESCO
Convention Treaty. So it was a different time.

Patricia
Connor: Oh sure.

Kenneth Pearson: You may think
we could make a career out of this, but when we went to
Turkey to do this, we were both interested in the
archaeology of the place. Intensely interested in it. We
were much more interested in looking at what trouble an
English archaeologist had without any sense of what might
happen at the end of the investigation. Whether he's a crook
or whether he's one of the greatest maltreated
archaeologists. Other things that could have come up on the
rim didn't interest that much. In fact, the very next thing
we did. I mean Turkey is overwhelmed by its 18 civilizations
-- was to do a multi-part series for the Sunday Times
color magazine on the 18 civilizations of Asia Minor. So
you can see how our interests, both of which allied with
each other, are about the history not about who's smuggling
the bits out of it.

When you saw Dikmen, you didn't think
-- Ah! There's a crook! You thought, here's a man who's
collecting.

Patricia Connor: Dikmen was collecting
pieces on Catal Huyuk. After all, Konya is very near Catal
Huyuk. He had some Hacilar pieces. The only thing that was
relevant to us was to establish whether or not he acquired
the pieces from Jimmie when the site was being excavated or
after it was being excavated. In other words, how he got
them.That was the only thing we were interested in those
two specific sites and those two specific little collections
he had, which weren't very spectacular compared to the
classical material and the Alexandria material. They were
not very impressive. I mean, one would never have fallen
over them and said, my God, what a major coup he's had
getting this stuff.

Kenneth Pearson: You could have
picked that stuff off the surface. In fact we
did.

[Note: Curiously, this is not the way Pearson and
Connor describe Dikmen's collection in The Dorak
Affair:

"We left the flat and followed him [Dikmen
down to the basement. And there, in a white-washed room
about sixteen feet long and eight feet wide, was his museum.
The walls were covered, almost without interruption, with
display cases which were packed with a dazzling variety of
precious objects: Lydian gold wreaths, vases of Rome and
Greece, boxes of coins. His collection, he said, contained
in all about 1,900 items. They were worth at a rough
estimate well over 10,000 pounds.

As beautiful as
the entire exhibition was, there were several objects
arranged neatly in a corner case which attracted our
immediate attention. It was like homing on a radar beam.
Dikmen had an obsidian mirror from Catal Huyuk, its unmarred
surface in infinitely better condition than that of the
examples preserved in the Ankara museum. He also had
obsidian blades and a necklace. There were other objects
which he claimed came from Catal Huyuk and were therefore
Neolithic, but in fact they were Early Bronze Age artifacts
from a site at Can Hasan further to the south. Alongside
these, Dikmen had place several pots from Hacilar,
Mellaart's other dig."]

Patricia Connor: When
we went to Hacilar and we collected, we walked across the
site. You could pick up potsherds everywhere. We had them in
a bag. They were only pieces, but you wouldn't have to look
very hard to turn up bits that were even more interesting
than we did. I can remember sitting on the dock at Jimmie's
or [ rather] Arlette's parents' house in Istanbul on the
Bosphorus -- absolutely beautiful house.

I can remember
sitting over drinks with bags of bits of pottery that we'd
collected all over Anatolia and Jimmie looking at them and
saying: "Greek" and throwing it in the Bosphorus. "Oh,
Roman" and throwing it away. There was so much that it was
of no importance. Nobody wanted it. We brought home some
Hacilar pieces. I've got some somewhere in a bag. We walked
out of customs like this and we were arrested in
Hacilar.

Kenneth Pearson: The first thing when the
police arrested us was -- the first thing I did was to pick
this bag up. It was always open. It's one thing to get
caught hiding something. Picked it up and showed it to them
and said -- that's come off the surface of the ground, you
can see.

When eventually we left Istanbul at night, I went
through customs holding it between us and nobody asked what
it was because it was there. I thought if it were in a bag
[suitcase], they'd say: Ah, it's there in the luggage. Well
what's this? Come this way.

So that was easy. With good
eyesight you could pick a lot of stuff up that Dikmen had
off the ground. Or bought it.

Suzan Mazur: You
brought them home.

Patricia Connor: Oh, but they're
only tiny sheRds. There isn't any object. They're only
potsherds.

Suzan Mazur: No actual
figures.

Pearson and Connor: Oh no. No.
No.

Kenneth Pearson: You have to keep your nose as
clean as a whistle if you're going to do the story. There
were Turkish newspapers waiting to pounce on us if we'd had
anything on us that was dirty...

Patricia Connor:
But you see when we were arrested in Hacilar, it was
actually quite frightening because we were picked up in a
car. We were in a car, we had a chauffeur. The police just
swooped in on either side and we were taken away to the
police station. Then, of course, they were interviewing us
about what we were doing in Hacilar, why we'd been taking to
the peasants, etc., etc., etc. Our interpreter was dealing
with the interviewer. We had no idea what was being
said.

Kenneth Pearson: In fact, he would ask you a
question which would only require a two-word answer. And a
long conversation would ensue between him and the chief
inspector.

I stopped him. "Just answer what we've told
you. Don't have a conversation."

I could see us winding up
in a jail.

Patricia Connor: I don't think it's as
sinister as that. But when you look at Hacilar -- the people
in Hacilar standing in front of holes in the middle of the
site. I mean they're digging all the time. They're making
stuff all the time. They're selling it. And they're
extremely wealthy.

Suzan Mazur: You mentioned in
the book Hugo Weissman. You said you've lost track of him.
In ensuing years Aydin Dikmen has gotten involved in making
fakes and he sold some fake Hacilar pieces to Hugo Weissman
that disintegrated in the sink.

Patricia Connor:
[Laughs]

Suzan Mazur: So I was interested in
talking to Hugo Weissman.

Kenneth Pearson: He was
very old.

Patricia Connor: I would think he's
presumably pre-war émigré German. He was in his 70s then.
I wouldn't think [he'd be alive]. But ask Julia about him.
Dikmen's based in Munich?

Suzan Mazur: He moves
around.

Patricia Connor: Turkey?

Suzan
Mazur: As you described him slippery. He moves
around.

Kenneth Pearson: Yes, he would have a
number of bases.

Patricia Connor: But one didn't
have the impression then that he was the kind of man that
was operating at that level.

Kenneth Pearson: Oh he
wasn't.

Patricia Connor: But even, perhaps, that he
had the potential for that.

Suzan Mazur: He was
still a romantic [in the book]. A jazz musician working
honestly, etc.

Patricia Connor: Have you met
him?

Suzan Mazur: It sounds like he was still
trying to decide which way to go. The legitimate way or go
for the money.

Kenneth Pearson: I thought when we
were dealing with this, as Pat was saying, with Dikmen, he
was a young man with a collection. Perhaps sharing the same
like of things that we liked. In terms of archaeological
artifacts, though we didn't collect. You wouldn't have
thought he was going to become this kind of figure that
apparently he is now. I remember with the Goldberg story --
when Dikmen's name came out, we were sitting at breakfast
and I said, "Good God look at this!"

Patricia
Connor: Well what we said was "Good God, look, there's a
photograph I took in the paper." That's what we
said.

[Note: More recently Dikmen was ordered to return
the pieces he acquired from north
Cyprus, which he'd hid in Munich over the years,
plastered inside the walls of various apartments before
being busted in the late 90s. According to Dutch art dealer
Michel van Rijn, a former business associate of Dikmen's,
"police had expected to find, at most, two or three dozen
Byzantine works not 350 pieces worth a cool $60 million."
And that Bavarian police had described it as "the largest
mix of stolen art and antiquities recovered since caches of
Nazi loot were traced after World War II."]

Suzan
Mazur: How did they get the image?

Patricia
Connor: They just lifted it out of the book. But you
haven't talked to Jimmie at all? He won't talk to
you?

Suzan Mazur: I spoke to him briefly. He said
he didn't want to discuss Aydin Dikmen, which makes me want
to find out why.

[Note: Mellaart told me the following
in a 1991 phone conversation: "I don't want to discuss that
man. I'd rather not. I don't like people who ruin
archaeological sites. I know he had a collection of certain
objects which are certainly from excavations. I don't like
to go on."]

Patricia Connor: To a greater or
lesser extent their lives must have been intertwined.
There's a sense ... if you've got a man who's living and is
a collector five, ten miles from the site you're digging,
you're bound to at least 'emesh' somehow... You're bound to
be put together by imputation in a sense, particularly if
there's a gossip press dealing with it. It's
inevitable.

Kenneth Pearson: Well I'll tell you
what a shifting world it is. One day we were walking in the
covered bazaar, standing looking at showcases with material.
Twenty feet from the shop a man comes up and says, "What do
you think of that Alexander coin? It's the only one in
Turkey."

And I say "What about the other one I saw
yesterday?"

"Ah, he says, you are very clever -- come with
me."

Five feet further, he's shows something and I say,
"Well that's a fake," without knowing it, "That's a
fake."

"I see you know something about the business," he
says.

And you get slowly and slowly into the shop until
you're actually in his tiny office in front of a crummy desk
and he says, "You need something special." And he starts to
open drawers at the bottom and unwrap old newspaper and
produce a goddess or something.

How the hell do you know
that's not a fake? ... . Draws you in subtly and subtly by
flattery and then says, "Now I'm going to sell you the real
thing."

Patricia Connor: The whole business of the
bazaar. This was a time when you could go into the Istanbul
bazaar and investigate antiquities. If you tried to do it in
the covered bazaar in Damascus, you'd come out with a knife
between your shoulder blades. It was high stakes. All our
mail was opened because we were based in the part of
Istanbul which sadly is no more. But it was then... the real
old-fashioned hotel. We were sending messages back to the
color magazine. At one point we sent questions about some
dealer. I can't remember who it was now. And we got a
message saying: "Interpol says do not investigate." Yes, it
was quite serious stuff.

[Connor reads a letter from
The New Yorker 's Joe Alsop, who also traveled to
Catal Huyuk in the 60s:]

"About Catal. The whole
expedition we took together as I said was entirely my idea.
And I doubt indeed whether Mellaart ever heard of me before
I wrote to him. And anyone who accuses Mellaart of
persuading me to write about him in America is a malicious
liar. You may publish this letter if it is of any use to
you."

So Alsop got embroiled, I remember that. If he were
still alive, he might be somebody worth talking
to.

Kenneth Pearson: Well it would be in The New
Yorker files.

*************

Suzan Mazur
is the author of The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of
the Evolution Industry.Her reports have appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist,
Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology,
Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and
MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and
various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

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